I recall this being done as a short on "The Electric Company."

That would be really interesting. This whole post was triggered by my discovery last night (courtesy of derspatchel in his Facebook capacity) that a joke my family has told for years—my grandfather is the first person I can remember hearing it from, although it has since become a household punchline, almost inevitably applied when someone has to repeat themselves more than twice—appeared in animated form on The Electric Company. I'm thinking this may be a time-honored piece of shtick, reintroduced to a wider audience by television. Comments seem split pretty evenly so far between people who learned it from family and people who learned it from peer groups and/or TV.